Posts Tagged ‘trial’

I’m going to say from the outset that I watched this trial as little as I could. That said, it was on so incessantly that I learned a fair amount about it whether I wanted to or not.

Before I say anything about the Casey Anthony verdict, let me explain why I didn’t watch much of the trial. Three Words: O.J. Simpson.

The O.J. Simpson verdict was such an obvious miscarriage of justice that it sickened me. It was for the criminal justice system what Watergate was for politics. The result of both was an accurate sense of cynicism and a profound degree of distrust in justice in America.

I still think back to the O.J. verdict and what had preceded it: the “bad” verdict in the case against the officers who participated in the Rodney King beating. Do you remember the riots? Remember Los Angeles exploding into fire? Remember that white truck driver who was dragged out of his truck by black rioters who then proceeded to smash his skull with a brick? And why did they do that? Because of the injustice they saw in the case against the police officers who had beaten Rodney King.

And the same black people who had been so appalled at the miscarriage of justice then felt entitled to not only riot, but then issue yet another miscarriage of justice: O.J. Simpson was found not guilty because he was black.

Don’t get me wrong. Racist blacks getting even with racist whites just barely even scratches the surface that has resulted in the death of truth in our postmodern culture.

That case, and many others since, have poisoned my trust in the American justice system. There are so many bad juries and bad judges and bad lawyers and bad prosecutors that you might as well spin a wheel and accept the results.

So we’ve got the next exciting jury trial (and why so many people can get so into this sordid crap is itself an indictment against the moral depravity of our society). You can watch every days coverage, you can watch just about every minute of coverage, and the bottom line is that what you see has virtually nothing whatsoever to do with how the jury votes.

Personally, it frightens me that I could have my fate decided by a group of people who are so morally idiotic and so freaking stupid that they actually voted for Barack Obama for president. The sheer number of stupid and depraved people appalls and frightens me. And that number is growing by leaps and bounds.

Now, from what I saw, Casey Anthony was guilty, guilty guilty of killing her daughter. Her kid was missing for a month or more, and I would have spent more time looking for a lost cat (and I’m a DOG person!) than Casey spent looking for her daughter. She then tells one lie after another to explain away the missing daughter. Cadaver dogs reacted to Casey’s car. Extremely high levels of chloroform were found in Casey’s car. The body of little Caley Anthony still had duct tape that had clearly covered her face. No one else had anything to do with this girl’s death or her being thrown out like garbage in a trash bag but Casey Anthony.

Whether it was premeditated or accidental (although how does duct tape get “accidentally” wrapped around a kid’s nose and mouth?), Casey Anthony is the only one who was involved. And she’s going to just walk away. Probably with a lot of money (although I understand the judge could deny her the ability to profit from this case because of her four convictions for lying to investigators in the case).

I guess it was a retroactive abortion: and Casey exercised her “right to choose.” And how dare we question a woman exercising her right to choose to kill her baby?

I’m disgusted by this verdict. And what’s worse, I actually cynically KNEW all along that I’d end up being disgusted by this verdict.

I write this as someone who has been watching his culture going to hell for the last twenty years. And then sees to his horror that the pace of that descent into hell has picked up as it marches faster and faster. And in goose step, too.

This article from a mainstream liberal does so many things. 1) It tells us the only thing that keeps Obama from already being the complete loser and failure Jimmy Carter was is Rahm Emanuel; 2) It tells us that Barack Obama has repeatedly ignored wise advice and paid attention to far-left liberal lunacy; and 3) It points out that the failure of health care isn’t Republican obstructionism, but Barry Hussein stupidity and his refusal to try to pass bills that Republicans could have supported.

I’m glad that even liberals are starting to recognize that this health care mess we’re in wasn’t the Republicans’ fault; it was Obama’s incompetence and hard-core liberal ideology.

It is the current fashion to blame President Obama’s disappointing first year on his chief of staff. “First, remove Rahm Emanuel,” writes Leslie Gelb in the Daily Beast, because he lacks “the management skills and discipline to run the White House.”

They join liberal interests who despised Emanuel long before he branded them “retarded.” Jane Hamsher of firedoglake.com, together with conservative activist Grover Norquist, demanded a Justice Department investigation into Emanuel, who is “far too compromised to serve as gatekeeper to the president.”

As Emanuel would say: What the [expletive deleted]?

Clearly, “Rahmbo” has no shortage of enemies in this town, and with Obama’s approval rating dipping below 50 percent, they have ammunition. But sacking Emanuel is the last thing the president should do.

Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter.

Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.

Obama’s problem is that his other confidants — particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod — are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn’t dirty his hands in politics.

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel’s counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn’t politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn’t met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.

The president disregarded that strategy and sided with Capitol Hill liberals who hoped to ram a larger, less popular bill through Congress with Democratic votes only. The result was, as the world now knows, disastrous.

Had it gone Emanuel’s way, a politically popular health-care bill would have passed long ago, leaving plenty of time for other attractive priorities, such as efforts to make college more affordable. We would have seen a continuation of the momentum of the first half of 2009, when Obama followed Emanuel’s strategy and got 11 substantive bills on his desk before the August recess.

Instead, Congress has ground to a halt, on climate legislation, Wall Street reforms and virtually everything else. Emanuel, schooled by Bill Clinton, knew what the true believers didn’t: that bite-sized proposals add up to big things.

Contrast Emanuel’s wisdom with that of Jarrett, in charge of “intergovernmental affairs and public engagement” — two areas of conspicuous failure. Jarrett also brought in Desiree Rogers as White House social secretary; the Salahi embarrassment ensued. Then there’s Gibbs. It’s hard to make the case that you’re a post-partisan president when your on-camera spokesman is a hyper-partisan former campaign flack.

No wonder Emanuel has set up his own small press operation and outreach function to circumvent the dysfunctional ones that Jarrett and Gibbs run. Obama needs an old Washington hand to replace Jarrett and somebody with gravitas on the podium to step in for Gibbs.

The failure of the president’s message also reflects on his message maven, Axelrod, who is an adept strategist but blinded by Obama love. A good example was Obama’s unproductive China trip in November. Jarrett, Gibbs and Axelrod went along as courtiers; Emanuel remained at his desk in Washington, struggling to keep alive the big health-care bill that he didn’t want in the first place.

In hiring Emanuel, Obama avoided the mistakes of his Democratic predecessors, who first gave the chief of staff job to besotted loyalists. Now in trouble, Obama needs fewer acolytes and more action. Rahm should stay.

If Rahm Emanuel doesn’t have a giant man-crush on Barack Obama, maybe he should stay. Certainly, if the Milbrank article has any truth to it, Rahm Emanuel would be the only one at the White House who has either common sense or a freaking clue.

It’s actually quite funny. Democrats are increasingly at each others’ throats while all the while telling everyone (and I’m sure trying to reassure themselves) that everything is right as rain.

Whether Rahm Emanuel stays, or whether someone else goes, Barry Hussein is an utter failure, and a future utter disgrace. You can change the whole rest of the team and it won’t matter, because their franchise player is an incompetent loser.

While I don’t wish to speak too harshly about President Obama’s state of the union address, we live in challenging times that call for candor. I call them as I see them, and I hope my frank assessment will be taken as an honest effort to move this conversation forward.

Last night, the president spoke of the “credibility gap” between the public’s expectations of their leaders and what those leaders actually deliver. “Credibility gap” is a good way to describe the chasm between rhetoric and reality in the president’s address. The contradictions seemed endless.

He called for Democrats and Republicans to “work through our differences,” but last year he dismissed any notion of bipartisanship when he smugly told Republicans, “I won.”

He talked like a Washington “outsider,” but he runs Washington! He’s had everything any president could ask for – an overwhelming majority in Congress and a fawning press corps that feels tingles every time he speaks. There was nothing preventing him from pursuing “common sense” solutions all along. He didn’t pursue them because they weren’t his priorities, and he spent his speech blaming Republicans for the problems caused by his own policies.

He dared us to “let him know” if we have a better health care plan, but he refused to allow Republicans in on the negotiations or consider any ideas for real free market and patient-centered reforms. We’ve been “letting him know” our ideas for months from the town halls to the tea parties, but he isn’t interested in listening. Instead he keeps making the nonsensical claim that his massive trillion-dollar health care bill won’t increase the deficit.

Americans are suffering from job losses and lower wages, yet the president practically demanded applause when he mentioned tax cuts, as if allowing people to keep more of their own hard-earned money is an act of noblesse oblige. He claims that he cut taxes, but I must have missed that. I see his policies as paving the way for massive tax increases and inflation, which is the “hidden tax” that most hurts the poor and the elderly living on fixed incomes.

He condemned lobbyists, but his White House is filled with former lobbyists, and this has been a banner year for K Street with his stimulus bill, aka the Lobbyist’s Full Employment Act. He talked about a “deficit of trust” and the need to “do our work in the open,” but he chased away the C-SPAN cameras and cut deals with insurance industry lobbyists behind closed doors.

He spoke of doing what’s best for the next generation and not leaving our children with a “mountain of debt,” but under his watch this year, government spending is up by 22%, and his budget will triple our national debt.

He spoke of a spending freeze, but doesn’t he realize that each new program he’s proposing comes with a new price tag? A spending freeze is a nice idea, but it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem. We need a comprehensive examination of the role of government spending. The president’s deficit commission is little more than a bipartisan tax hike committee, lending political cover to raise taxes without seriously addressing the problem of spending.

He condemned bailouts, but he voted for them and then expanded and extended them. He praised the House’s financial reform bill, but where was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in that bill? He still hasn’t told us when we’ll be getting out of the auto and the mortgage industries. He praised small businesses, but he’s spent the past year as a friend to big corporations and their lobbyists, who always find a way to make government regulations work in their favor at the expense of their mom & pop competitors.

He praised the effectiveness of his stimulus bill, but then he called for another one – this time cleverly renamed a “jobs bill.” The first stimulus was sold to us as a jobs bill that would keep unemployment under 8%. We now have double digit unemployment with no end in sight. Why should we trust this new “jobs bill”?

He talked about “making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development,” but apparently it’s still too tough for his Interior Secretary to move ahead with Virginia’s offshore oil and gas leases. If they’re dragging their feet on leases, how long will it take them to build “safe, clean nuclear power plants”? Meanwhile, he continued to emphasize “green jobs,” which require massive government subsidies for inefficient technologies that can’t survive on their own in the real world of the free market.

He spoke of supporting young girls in Afghanistan who want to go to school and young women in Iran who courageously protest in the streets, but where were his words of encouragement to the young girls of Afghanistan in his West Point speech? And where was his support for the young women of Iran when they were being gunned down in the streets of Tehran?

Despite speaking for over an hour, the president only spent 10% of his speech on foreign policy, and he left us with many unanswered questions. Does he still think trying the 9/11 terrorists in New York is a good idea? Does he still think closing Gitmo is a good idea? Does he still believe in Mirandizing terrorists after the Christmas bomber fiasco? Does he believe we’re in a war against terrorists, or does he think this is just a global crime spree? Does he understand that the first priority of our government is to keep our country safe?

In his address last night, the president once again revealed that there’s a fundamental disconnect between what the American people expect from their government, and what he wants to deliver. He’s still proposing failed top-down big government solutions to our problems. Instead of smaller, smarter government, he’s taken a government that was already too big and supersized it.

Real private sector jobs are created when taxes are low, investment is high, and people are free to go about their business without the heavy hand of government. The president thinks innovation comes from government subsidies. Common sense conservatives know innovation comes from unleashing the creative energy of American entrepreneurs.

Everything seems to be “unexpected” to this administration: unexpected job losses; unexpected housing numbers; unexpected political losses in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. True leaders lead best when confronted with the unexpected. But instead of leading us, the president lectured us. He lectured Wall Street; he lectured Main Street; he lectured Congress; he even lectured our Supreme Court Justices.

He criticized politicians who “wage a perpetual campaign,” but he gave a campaign speech instead of a state of the union address. The campaign is over, and President Obama now has something that candidate Obama never had: an actual track record in office. We now can see the failed policies behind the flowery words. If Americans feel as cynical as the president suggests, perhaps it’s because the audacity of his recycled rhetoric no longer inspires hope.

Real leadership requires results. Real hope lies in the ingenuity, generosity, and boundless courage of the American people whose voices are still not being heard in Washington.